Just received this email from DreamHost:
I’m writing to regretfully inform you that we have decided to end our
business relationship with you.
One of the main reasons is that your site ‘mtdewvirus.com’ is pretty much
100% 24 hours a day getting hit with comment spam and consuming vast
amounts of resources on our servers. Attempts have been made to mitigate
and stop the attacks, but they are futile. At this point, we really
can’t justify expending any more resources with this issue, so we’ve
decided it is in the best interests of all parties involved that we
terminate the relationship.
Per the “Termination” section of our terms of service available at
http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html, we are hereby giving you a 30 day
notice before your account is closed, so you can make arrangements for
hosting elsewhere and get your files and databases moved.
DreamHost Quoted
So…I need a new web host. Any suggestions? The spam isn’t getting through to my site, but it’s obviously attacking the server where I’m hosted. This is most likely going to follow me wherever I go, so I may have to re-evaluate what I want to do with some of my blogs.
Update: Yesterday DreamHost changed their mind and took back the 30 day notice. They are going to try and come up with something to block the attacks before they hit Apache.
Nick Momrik 
Hmm, I think based on that using any typed of shared hosting package could (at least in theory) land you in the same place. Given any thought to a VPS or even a dedicated? Or is that more money than you feel like spending for your lonsey-self?
I’m with Surpass Hosting and I adore them so much. I’d fully recommend them, but regardless of where you decide to go, I’d maybe shoot off something to the sales department and see if they might work something out with you based on what you know your sites are generating (i.e. the comment spam thing, lots of traffic, etc.).
Best of luck, hon!
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I’ve had a dedicated host in the past when I owned pokerchiptricks.com, but that was because of the bandwidth I needed to provide the videos on the site. My current sites don’t get much traffic at all, it’s the spammers who are killing me.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check them out.
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Oh, that’s great; I’m glad to hear it Nick.
I saw your Twitter about Media Temple, though; just for the record, I’ve heard excellent things about them.
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I used to be with 1&1, but they host databases on a separate, woefully slow, server.
I’ve been with MediaTemple for about 2 weeks now and so far, service has been pretty good. Using their Gridserver package, maybe try it out?
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I’ve actually taken a look at the Gridserver package from MediaTemple. Nice to hear it works well.
The spam attacks seem to have died off, so I might just stick with my current package and hope they don’t come back as hard as they had been hitting me. I really don’t want to deal with host changes and all that jazz if I don’t have to.
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I have heard good feedbacks about Media Temple. Why don’t you try ’em.
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I’ve been really happy with http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net. It’s cheap and has been really good to me over the past year I’ve been with them.
Feel free to drop me an email if you want more info on nearlyfreespeech 🙂
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I’ve had a bad experience with MediaTemple’s GridServer recently. They went down for 7 hours on Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), and have had mediocre speed, etc. Their service is good, however.
I’ve been happy with 1&1.com, although they don’t have PHP5 or some of the fancy Rails stuff. They have everything I need generally, and are cheap. They have had great uptime for me. I know people hate them, but I’ve had a good experience.
I’ve recently tried A2 hosting; they have PHP5 and Rails, etc, as well as a nicer admin interface than 1&1. I’m a web designer, and so I use lots of hosting services.
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